Thursday, 20 November 2008

Comment of the day

I particularly liked this comment from yesterday's post on UK export performance:

one time export manager said...

Not all that long ago, the FCO and DTI used to run a dedicated service for exporters. Commercial officers overseas at the sharp end, many of whom fluently spoke the local language, actively sought out would be buyers in their countries and passed detailed information back to the DTI to include in their commercial information dissemination service.

This was a highly praised by many users (as well as criticised of course when details did not exactly match a supplier's product) and was envied by many of our competitors.

Does this service still exist, and if not, what happened to it?

I have a sneaky feeling that New Labour gave it the chop; it was too business friendly.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I can offer some perspective: I run a successful global consulting service. I approached these guys to get some help prior to visiting clients in South Africa. What was it like? They were utterly, completely, amazingly, incompetent, arrogant, useless and a total friggin waste of public money. They knew nothing about business and after much, chasing sent a lame email wishing me luck. I now feel New Labour 'owns' the current economic failure: it is all their to behold. Bastards!